Thursday, March 11, 2010

In case anyone needed further evidence that President Paul Kagame's Rwanda is the Pentagon's proxy, 140 Rwandan Police are about to undertake special training before heading to Haiti, as reported in the Rwanda New Times, because, according to Rwandan Police Chief Edmund Kayiranga, "Rwanda wants to be involved in promoting peace in other countries and if need be, they would send more peacekeepers to other countries."Rwandan Police are off to Haiti to promote peace, even as: 1) Grenades explode in Kigali in the run up to its 2010 presidential election, and two of three viable parties are still unable to register and field candidates against incumbent President Paul Kagame.2) A new list of the five most horrible prisons on earth includes Rwanda's Kigali Gitarama Prison, and describes it as the most overcrowded penitentiary in the world, so overcrowded that prisoners have no choice but to stand up all day while their feet rot in filth, often developing gangrene, which may require amputation. (Amnesty International reported, in 2007, that Gitarama Prison was way overcrowded, with 7,477 prisoners in space for 3,000.) 3) Top military commanders and government officials flee the country, and journalists go into hiding to escape arrest. 4) Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative Group, the Africa Faith and Justice Network, the Greens European Free Alliance, and Senator Russ Feingold, D-WI, Chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Africa, call for human rights, an end to attacks on political opposition, and a free and fair presidential election, with polls scheduled for August 9th, 2010.And why does Haiti need all these U.S. and UN Troops and now, Rwandan Police "peacekeepers"? Even France accused the U.S. of occupying rather than aiding the former jewel of the French empire, but it's very difficult to interpret this as anything but France's pseudo moral complaint against its longstanding imperial competitor--England and the Anglophone world---in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Before the catastrophic Haitian earthquake on January 12th, 2010, Haitian lawyer and human rights activist Margeurite Laurent pointed to little known oil reserves and mineral riches to explain the already existing UN and U.S. occupation of her homeland, on Salon.com, CKUT Radio, and the San Francisco Bay View.

Sound familiar? Where else do Rwandan troops, if not police, serve? Wherever the U.S. wants to project military force in Africa, including resource rich nations, like oil rich Sudan, which the U.S. forever threatens to invade "to stop genocide," and now, resource rich Haiti, which much of the world perceives as a part of Africa as much as a part of the Americas.

This unlikely and unholy alliance emerged in eastern D.R. Congo, on Barack Obama's Inauguration Day, when all eyes were on Washington D.C., the first African American U.S. president, Reverend Rick Warren, celebrities all over the streets, and Aretha Franklin's hat. So little of the world heeds or makes sense of Sub Saharan African news that only a handful of bloggers, dissident journalists and scholars noted, that D.R. Congo had, that day, become a violent D.R. Disneyland.

In December 2009, Keith Harmon Snow reported, in Dissident Voice and the San Francisco Bay View, that soldiers of the Rwandan Defense Forces were being flown all the way across D.R. Congo, from its eastern border with Rwanda to its Western border with the Republic of Congo, in oil and timber rich Equateur Province, to join AFRICOM, UN Peacekeepers (MONUC), and Belgian paratroopers, in suppressing the Dongo Rebellion.

Why not Congolese soldiers? Because they lack the discipline of the Pentagon's Rwandan proxy army, and, as Keith Snow reported, many of them were defecting to join the Western Congolese fighters calling themselves the Resistance Patriots of Dongo.

Now, with 140 Rwandan Police about to undertake training to serve as peacekeepers in Haiti, the first question is: Why peacekeepers? Didn't Haiti suffer an earthquake, not a war, aside from the arrival of 10,000 U.S. troops?

And, why not 140 more Haitian Police? Why Rwandans? If Haiti needs "peacekeepers" within its own borders, shouldn't Haitians be best able to keep the peace?